Your heartbeat may help you sync up with other people to cooperate

Your heartbeat might help you cooperate. When we make a movement, even a small one, it is most likely to end exactly in the middle of each heartbeat – and this synchronisation happens when we watch someone else do the same behaviour. This could be how our bodies help us align our actions with others.

“We don’t yet know if the heartbeat is guiding the action or responding to it,” says Eleanor Palser at the University of California, San Francisco. She and her colleagues examined how heartbeats sync with actions using electrocardiograms …